Currently, many projects in GeoVista center (at Pennsylvania State University) deal with unstructured textual data and require parsing of space, time, and entitiy information from textual document. Trying to compare one of our text-mining tool with other projects, I stumbled across many freely available text-mining tools. However, comparing them directly wouldn’t have made sense as they offer different levels of functionality. Hence, I have classified text-mining approaches into four categories and the table below list some of the text-mining tools that are freely available online.

Classification of Text-mining approaches:

1. Keyword Extractors – Traditionally, text-mining tools mainly involve determining important keywords in a document. This is done by creating a “term vector matrix” and assigning certain score to each word. This approach forms the core of any search engine (checkout the table below).

2. Entity Extractor – Current text-mining tools go beyond identifying terms but they also try to classify these terms into basic categories such as person, orgnaization, city, region, money, etc. Such text-mining tools are often referred as “entity-extraction tools” (checkout the table below).

3. Entity Relation extractors: The objective here is not only to find entities mentioned in the document, but also how they are related to each other. I wasn’t able to find any freely available online tools that do this, but I am aware that some PennState researchers are working on this.

4. Document Relation Extractors: The objective here is to go beyound the limits of a single document and identify common themes between different documents and how they related to each other. I haven’t seen any tool that currently provide such feature.

Whatizit has interesting concept of pipeline which allows you to select a vocabulary

Based on my personal evaluation, I felt ClearForest SWS does a pretty good job of entity extraction. It was able to find people, organizations, cities, regions, country. Further it offers its technology and tools in various formats such as firefox addon, desktop java application, webservice, and an online tool. Below is an image of clearForest tool as a firefox-addon.

thanks for the link. I tried using summarization tool and its really interesting. Is there any SOAP webservice that I can use. I am building a tool that compares different text mining algorithm. It wil be nice to have Text Summarization over there.

There are many different algorithms for text mining. I am not an expert of text mining but here are some points for you. Search for “Natural language Processing algorithms” and ‘latent semantic analysis’.

I am trying to do something that does not seem to match what you have described.

I have a CSV text file with millions of rows. Each represents parts of an user action (has user name and date/time plus other data related to user action). Each user action consists of several rows in the text file. For example, a user entering a medication order will result in multiple rows in the text file (the rows will be close together in the file, but will not always appear as back to back rows in the file). We need to find the most common group of rows/records in the file so we know what are the most common user actions.

I was wondering if there is a name for this type of search and of any available tools (web-based preferably) that could assist.